geek

Interesting read for any parent!

If for some reason when you try and run your code and you get a PINVOKE exception (like the one below), then most likely you don’t have the LeapMotion binaries in your Debug (or Release) folders. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 System.TypeInitializationException was unhandled HResult=-2146233036 Message=The type initializer for 'Leap....

I have seen this a few times now so I know it is not a one off, but it seems that the sleeves of my shirt seem to throw off the Leap Motion sensor and it detects it as another hand - and ends up showing three hands. I thought it was my watch which might be causing some issue, but that was not it. It goes away when I am wearing a t-shirt, but the tracking is quite off when wearing a full sleeve shirt....

I was cleaning out my old papers (finally!) and came across an old paper I had titled “ Compiler Writing Tools using C# ” which essentially shows how you can write a number of tools like lex and yacc but instead of C/C++ on Unix, you use C# and .NET. This paper covers the tokenizer, grammar , DFA , NFA , etc. I think conflicts and precedence is one area it would need a little more work....

I am giving a presentation next week on NoSQL and as part of that I wanted to create a Word Map, similar to the ones I have seen in the Guardian over the years. After searching a little, I came across the following two sites which do an excellent job of this. Both of them allow a number of options to customise the output and I think are very cool!...

I have been doing some research on MANETs and UAV’s and this TED talk is a great example of how a number of nodes operate in a MANET and implement some predetermined algorithm, which in this case is the Bond Theme Song. Worth watching. :)

Microsoft recently release the Kinect SDK which allows you to implement a Natural User Interface and program against it! There is a lot of interest around including claims on how Robotics will change to how you can integrate a light sensor. You can use Visual Studio (C++, C# and VB.NET supported) and get quite interesting results. Here are a series of links below which will help you get started. Download and install the Kinect SDK Download and install Quickstart Samples and Slides (zip file) Understanding the Kinect hardware Setting up your Dev Environment Understanding the basics of skeletal tracking using the Kinect sensor Understanding camera fundamentals Understanding the audio fundamentals Playing with the Coding4Fun Kinect toolkit and seeing how one can build cool apps such as: Kinect Paint (which uses skeleton tracking) Kinect Mouse which uses your hands as the mouse cursor Keep and eye out on the Coding4Fun Kinect blog ....

After moving to Bangalore, it turns out that I would need to get one or more UPS’s for the machines at home. The place we will be moving to in a few weeks does have power backup, but if/when there is a power cut it takes a few minutes for the generators to kick in and is not instantaneous as I was thinking. I have never bought a UPS until now and don’t have any experience with it - what are the things that I need to consider?...

Upgrading through *all* versions of Windows from v1 thru to Win7.

I was planning on getting the Telegesis ETRX2USB and wanted to know if there are any open source (or shareware) open source ZigBee stacks that I can use with that? I also wanted to know if there is any opensource (or not too expensive), network management or network analyser for a ZigBee network? Essentially I want to be able to programatically view network and node information on the ZigBee network (e....

The latest version of WordPress 3.0.3 and the Redirection plugin (v 2.2.3) don’t play nice together. If you upgraded to the latest version of WordPress the redirection plugin will always show only your last post on your blog’s homepage. Until the plugin is fixed, the only way around this is either not to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress (not recommended), or to disable the Redirection plugin.

As you might have heard, the Cray XMT implemented a multithreaded processor architecture (called Threadstorm); these processors are compatible with Socket F which means they can use the AMD Opteron CPUs. The interesting part however is that these Threadstorm CPU’s only execute user code and avoids memory dependency stalls i.e. when the memory dependence prediction goes wrong and stalls the specific load to ensure there is no violation. The Cray XMT does this by switching among 128 concurrent threads....

This is quite cool – now only if MS hurry’s up and incorporated this to Bing Maps. MS Street Slide

This computer hardware chart is quite cool. Not sure why, where and who would want to use this. But, it does beg the question – can things get any geekier? :)

If you were interested in algorithms and interested in some mathematical foundations for algorithm analysis? For example if you are interested in proof techniques, probability, Amortization analysis techniques, Case studies and Asymptotic notions (such as Big-Oh, Big-Omega, Little-oh, little-omega, Big-Theta) then check out these lecture notes (in ppt, 224kb) from California State University.

Well this is the phone I have maybe some day I will try this - pretty geeky albeit useless. :)

(: ¿ɥǝ sıɥʇ sı looɔ ʍoɥ

I finally got the time to upgrade my MCE with the RTM bits of Win7 (was running an old RC build until now). Given this is a dedicated MCE with nothing else on it and an on an isolated part of the network, I don’t have a password set for the Account I use to login (of course not a recommended practice). Now, I wanted to RDP to the machine and I realised then that Win 7 does not allow RDP with blank passwords by default (Vista behaves in the same fashion)....

I encountered this interesting issue and thanks to Colin we were able to resolve it. There will be situations you will encounter when adding additional optional attributes to a Flat File (FF) schema in BizTalk will cause problems. To get around this you basically will need to set the following properties to relax the parsing of the attributes which break. 1 2 3 - parser_optimization="complexity" - allow_early_termination="true" - early_terminate_optional_fields="true" This got me thinking more and wanting to understand what does changing these attributes mean under the covers....

If you use the Synaptic Package Manager in Ubuntu 9.04 to install OpenSceneGraph, by default it will install version 2.4.x. However if you want to install OpenSceneGraph 2.8.1 then you need to do the following in a terminal: Modify the file /etc/apt/sources.list (make sure you run it via sudo something like: sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list) Add the following two lines in the end and save the file: deb http://openscenegraph.dachary.org/packaging-farm/openscenegraph/gnulinux/debian/unstable/src ./ deb-src http://openscenegraph....